Concord game director Ryan Ellis has reportedly stepped down from his role at Firewalk Studios. The Concord servers were officially shut down almost two weeks ago, and that happened only days after PlayStation announced it was pulling the plug on the fledgling hero shooter and refunding sales en masse.
Per Kotaku, last week Ellis informed staff at Firewalk that he would be stepping down as game director and taking on something of a “support role”. This, obviously coupled with Concord’s cancelation, has reportedly left the developers at Firewalk facing an uncertain future, as it’s said that PlayStation has yet to inform them of its plans for the studio.
The situation is especially tragic because, in this instance, it seems very little of the game’s failure can be attributed to the developers. It’s hard to say for sure why it failed to attract an audience, but it almost certainly had to do with Sony‘s lackluster marketing and the fact that it cost $40 whereas most live-service shooters are free-to-play. Regardless, analyst Simon Carless estimated to IGN that it only managed to sell around 25,000 copies, which would be considered by most a catastrophic failure for a big first-party PlayStation release.
Firewalk sources told Kotaku they’re “pessimistic” about the odds of PlayStation reviving Concord as some have speculated. Some devs have reportedly been asked to come up with pitches for new projects that would be entirely new, and there’s speculation from within the studio that Firewalk could become a co-developer on existing first-party projects.
Others fear the worst: that there will be mass layoffs including the possible shutdown of the studio entirely, which Kotaku’s sources say is one of the most expensive studios under the PlayStation umbrella from a per-head perspective. Due to the uncertainty, it’s said that some developers are updating their resumes and portfolios, while others have already left the studio preemptively.
Earlier in the year, Sony laid off around 900 people across its stable of game studios, including cuts at Naughty Dog, Insomniac, and the entirety of the now-defunct PlayStation London. PlayStation Studios also canceled multiple unannounced projects at the time.
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